


what the fuck are perfect places anyway?

by dangercupcake



Series: Perfect Places [2]
Category: Superstition by Superstition_hockey
Genre: F/M, Forgiveness, Gen, M/M, Past Relationship(s), Polyamory, Relationship Negotiation, Rookie/Vet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-10-09
Packaged: 2019-01-11 00:33:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12311121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dangercupcake/pseuds/dangercupcake
Summary: “Then you got hurt, and it turned out you, you know, were married to Chants that whole time, but hadn’t told us, hadn’t trusted us, had just let us fall in love -- had just let us really like you without any, without telling us that there was a whole . . .” Claude spreads his hands open. “That was really hard for us, for me, anyway, that I thought we were really close, but you hadn’t trusted me to tell me about Chants.”





	what the fuck are perfect places anyway?

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Restricted Work] by [Superstition_hockey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Superstition_hockey/pseuds/Superstition_hockey). Log in to view. 



Claude is forever grateful he has a wife who, besides all her other amazing qualities, is so good at being the big spoon.

***

Nothing dramatic happens. The Diques don’t go on a losing streak. They win two at home, lose one at home, then lose two on the road, then win one. Even Chants, the most superstitious of them all, can’t find a pattern in that. Spence, the rookie Claude had gently let down a few weeks ago, _that night_ , has taken to following Claude around anyway; he’s done two years in the NCAA, but it’s his first year in the show and he’s a ginger, so he seems to have appointed himself as Claude’s rookie, whether Claude likes it or not.

Claude is too old for a rookie.

They have a real rookie too, one who should have been sent back to juniors for at least a year, he’s all spindly limbs and big eyes, but that rookie is living in Chants and Jacks’ house with their menagerie and has yet to try to suck Claude’s dick. 

He probably, Claude thinks caustically and unfairly, is sucking Chants’ dick every chance he gets.

***

They lose at home to the Canucks because of a series of bad bounces -- or, if you really want to know why, because Claude can’t get his shit together on the PK. Jacks and Chants are as smooth as ever, double-shifting like they’re sixteen, never out of breath; they usually PK with Bianchi or Jimmy and it’s fucking seamless, but Claude. Cannot. Get. It. Together.

He goes home, listening to country and feeling sorry for himself, and Ryanne has a cold glass of white wine waiting for him when he gets inside. 

“You’re magic,” he tells her, dropping into one of their overstuffed living room chairs. 

“I was watching the game,” she says. “Baby.”

“Why were you watching? Nothing better to do tonight?”

“You told me last week you were having problems with the PK. I wanted to see.” She drains her glass and pours more. “You didn’t tell me this whole thing is about Oliver.”

Claude clenches his jaw. “Can you please call him Jackson?”

She sighs. “Baby. You should have answered his text. You should have just talked to him. You should have talked to him _two years ago_.”

“It hasn’t been two years.”

“Are you still counting the days?”

“I was never counting the days.” Claude finishes his wine and goes to the little table in the corner that functions as their wet bar for the whiskey. He brings the bottle back with him. If he’s going to have a relationship talk about a dead relationship, he’s damn well going to drink for it.

“I’m hurt too, Claude. But I want to deal with this like _adults_. Oliver is the only one who has the excuse of not being an adult here. We should have talked to him as soon as we felt the relationship changing, and instead we ignored it because we didn’t want him to . . . feel . . . awkward . . .”

“Because we didn’t want him to _run away from commitment!”_ shouts Claude. “Just say it! We didn’t want to scare him away, and then guess what, he’s already fucking married! He just didn’t trust us or care about us enough to tell us that he’s married to his fuck buddy! Who I even _like_ , to make it worse!”

“Okay, you’re yelling,” she says quietly, taking a deep breath in through her nose.

Claude sucks in a breath through his teeth. He definitely shouldn’t be yelling at Ryanne. But if he opens his mouth again --

“I thought maybe this time would be different.” She stares at him evenly from across the room. “This time Oliver . . . is ready to talk about what happened. He brought it up. He wants to talk to you.”

“Stop calling him Oliver.” Claude leaves the glass of whiskey and the bottle on the coffee table. He didn’t even get to drink any. He storms out of the room and upstairs. He wants to get out of this fucking suit and tie, wants to take another shower. The team meal is sitting heavy in his stomach. 

He can’t remember the last time he touched Jackson. Jacks. Oliver.

He can’t remember the last time he touched _Oliver_. That’s what they called him in bed. Claude only called him Jacks or Jackson to make fun of him, because it made him flush. It was always Oliver. He liked Oli, too, he’d said so shyly, “Sometimes people call me Oli,” hickeys on his neck, lying on one side of Claude while Ryanne laid on the other. He sometimes blushed when Ryanne took her clothes off, Claude remembers that. He wasn’t into women at all, but he and Ryanne would work together to take Claude apart, and he liked it when Ryanne fucked him with a strap-on if Claude was working on him at the same time. He was so _huge_ \-- is still huge, is actually bigger now than he was two years ago, three years ago, there had been plenty of him to go around. Plenty of body, plenty of dick. Claude sometimes woke up with his feet tucked on his shins, because Claude’s feet couldn’t reach Oliver’s feet.

Oliver liked having his feet rubbed, though; sometimes all three of them would pile on the bed and watch something dumb on HGTV and rub each others’ feet in a circle and get wine drunk. Sometimes Ryanne would watch Oliver and Claude have sex, and then jerk herself off, or let Claude lick her until she came all over his face.

Claude has too many memories.

He leans against the cold tile in the shower and shuts his eyes and lets them go through his head while the heat of the shower pounds onto him.

***

Ryanne is still the big spoon, even though she thinks he’s making a mistake by not talking to Oliver -- to Jackson. She holds onto him and kisses his back and never makes him speak English.

***

They have a genuine rest day, and Chants holds a get together at his house. It’s almost too cold to be milling around his vegetable gardens with the chickens, but Claude has an A -- if he didn’t show up, it would be weird, so he shrugs into an extra flannel shirt and wears a toque. He throws a few extra of both into the back of his car for whoever doesn’t think to bring their own. 

Before he goes in, he stares at Jackson’s text from a few weeks ago: _Would you have told me if I had done something?_

Claude _knows_ Ryanne is right and that he and Jackson need to have a conversation, but Claude doesn’t know how to start that conversation. Maybe if he has a few beers first, it would be better.

He texts back: _I’m here. Find me today. We need to have a private conversation._ No emojis, no text speak, no bullshit. He knows it’s totally the opposite of what people (Jackson) expect from him, that usually his texts are funnier, better, than that -- but Jacks had texted him in all seriousness, and Claude is returning the favor . . . like six weeks later. Not soon enough to keep Coach from breaking up their PK unit, but Claude wants to think Coach would understand if he told her.

Then he has a moment of horror at the idea of telling Coach what he’s going to talk to Jacks about today and it’s a true moment of wanting to die.

***

Jacks finds him coming out of one of the bathrooms on the second floor. 

“Second floor’s off limits,” he says, leaning against the wall.

“I’m a law-breaker,” says Claude, wiping his hands on his jeans. 

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard all about your run-ins with the law now.” Jacks holds up a can of beer and when Claude nods, Jacks gently tosses it across the hallway. “This private enough?”

“You have a study, or . . . any kind of room with a door that closes?”

Jacks nods and jerks his head. He’s got a sixer in his other hand, missing the one beer that he tossed to Claude. He’s clearly anticipating exactly the right thing.

Claude feels a little wry, and a little scared, and a little stupid for feeling scared, and a little stupid for even having this conversation. But he thinks again about Jacks’ question in the car, and his text, and Ryanne’s scolding -- and maybe it wasn’t fair to just ghost out of Jacks’ love life like that. Maybe he deserves an explanation. Something to put his mind at rest so he knows that . . . yes? It was something he did? 

This doesn’t feel like a great idea.

Claude pops the top of the beer and takes a long drink, wishing he was still young enough to shotgun a beer and not regret it.

Jacks leads them into a neat little corner room with a desk, a filing cabinet, and a few chairs, and all their trophies, and a bunch of framed jerseys -- not doubles of the ones that are downstairs, but ones from guys they’ve played with. Claude reads through them -- a Brent Burns one, a Hertl one, one of Claude’s Flyers ones . . . a bunch of juniors ones that Claude doesn’t quite recognize. He gets it, though: they’re private. Their marriage license is also framed, all creased with folds. Claude stops to look at it. They got married in Vegas, by Elvis T. Presley. Amazing.

“So, um,” says Jacks, “I’m sorry I fucked up the PK.” He opens a beer and takes a sip. “If that’s . . . I mean, I’m sorry.”

“No -- that’s all on me. I’ve been off. Coach was right when she said I need to get my head together. I’m not in a good hockey space. I know it.”

“Me either,” says Jacks, and it’s all Claude can do not to laugh, since Jacks has had a minimum of two assists per game for the past five games, and it’s usually Luc putting the biscuit in the basket when Jacks is on the ice. Even when they lose, Jacks is putting points up, because he’s the most unselfish player in hockey, and the best playmaker, and everyone in hockey knows it.

“Jackson.” Claude takes another long sip of beer. At least it’s decent beer, for shit that comes in a can and is made in Quebec. “Jacks. I think you know . . . I want to talk about something else.”

“You want to talk about . . . oh. Shit. Okay. Yeah. Let’s . . . talk about that.” Jacks goes from leaning against the desk awkwardly to dropping into one of the chairs, long limbs everywhere. 

Claude takes this as his cue to sit down, too, but he leans forward, leaning his arms on his thighs.

“Look. It wasn’t anything you did, as much as it was . . .” Claude swears to himself in French. “I wanted Ryanne to be here in case I fucked this up, but she said I had to do this myself, so. If I fuck this up, blame her.”

“You always used to say that.” Jackson smiles to himself, and Claude feels like he’s been punched in the chest. That tiny smile was _his smile_ , the smile he used to get when he brought _Oliver_ ice cream, or tickled his feet.

Claude clears his throat. “Ryanne and I -- we really -- Jesus. We really liked you. We liked what we were . . . doing. What we had.”

“I liked it too,” says Jacks earnestly. His eyes are so blue. Why is this happening to Claude.

“We knew you were an open guy,” Claude continues. “We knew you picked up, that you had a thing going with Chants, that your second season you had Dre, we didn’t mind that, we thought you were --” He has to stop here for deep breaths. “We thought that stuff was casual, that you had a really high sex drive, and we understood that. But we were . . . pretty serious about you. We . . . we were starting to be _a lot_ serious about you, do you know what I mean?”

“I don’t really . . .” Jacks trails off and stares at Claude.

“So we were.” Claude swallows hard and puts his beer down in an empty space. “We had been thinking maybe a conversation with you where we asked you to think about always coming back to us. Going and having your fun with people, but always coming back to, to our house, to our bed, to _us_ , having something real and serious with us. Being with us. For real.”

Jacks’ eyes are wide open and look _horrified_ and Claude isn’t sure why. Is he that bad? Ryanne kind of likes him, doesn’t think he’s that gross.

“Then you got hurt before we could, and it turned out you, you know, were married to Chants that whole time, but hadn’t told us, hadn’t trusted us, had just let us fall in love -- had just let us really like you without any, without telling us that there was a whole . . .” Claude spreads his hands open. “That was really hard for us, for me, anyway, that I thought we were really close, but you hadn’t trusted me to tell me about Chants.”

“I trusted you,” says Jacks, his voice breaking.

“You didn’t. And, you know, Ryanne keeps telling me, we’re the adults and you’re just a kid --” Jacks opens his mouth -- to argue about being a kid, Claude knows, so he rushes through the rest of what he wants to say. “You were even more of a kid then, we should have been better about communicating, we should have done better by you, not taken advantage --”

“You never took advantage of me,” Jacks says fiercely. “Claude.”

“I don’t know, maybe I did. Maybe you were too young to know what should have been happening. Maybe even though you kept saying it wasn’t a rookie thing, it really was a rookie thing. I don’t know.”

Shit, this is more than Claude wanted to say.

“I’m gonna go. Ryanne and I thought, since you asked, you deserved an answer. I mean, uh, you know, you asked me, so I’m answering. I didn’t handle it right back then, I should have done it better, you were just a kid and I didn’t behave right because I was hurt and I wasn’t thinking about what you needed, so -- I hope we can be okay.”

Jacks doesn’t say anything, so Claude just squeezes his shoulder and leaves the room, closing the door quietly. 

He makes sure everyone at the party sees his face again before he leaves.

But when he gets out front, Jacks is sitting in his car, in the passenger seat, drinking a fucking can of beer.

“I’m leaving,” Claude says shortly. There are two crumpled empties at Jacks’ feet. Jacks rolls his neck and looks at Claude.

“You couldn’t even give me five minutes to put two words together?” Jacks asks. “You’ve had years.”

“Twenty months is not years.” Claude wants to take it back as soon as he says it but Jacks bites his lip.

“I thought I was the only one counting,” he says quietly. “I thought I was all alone in this.”

“I fucked up,” Claude says, staring at the steering wheel. “I was your captain and I should have protected you, not . . . taken anything from you.”

“I lo -- I loved. Loved you,” says Jacks. “So much. You didn’t take anything. I wanted us . . . I wanted _us_. It --”

“You are _married_.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Fuck, Claude, what would you have done? Luc and I kept it secret from everyone, it’s not like he’d told any of the Sharks either. Until I got hurt.” 

Claude watches out of the corner of his eye as Jacks drains the can he’s holding and crumples it like the two on the floor. 

Jacks slouches in the passenger seat. “Fuck,” he says sighing. “I know it doesn’t matter now, but . . . I’m sorry you found out that way. That I didn’t tell you myself the way I should have. I didn’t . . .”

As Jacks apologizes, Claude feels worse and worse. He should feel better, but every apology makes him feel more and more like Jacks is _still_ that kid that Claude should have known better than to sleep with because he was _a kid_ and Claude was _an adult_. Jacks shouldn’t be apologizing for keeping a secret that could fuck up his whole life if it got out; Claude-the-captain knows that.

Claude the guy, the guy whose heart was broken that Jacks hadn’t trusted him or wanted him as much as Claude had wanted him . . . also feels shitty listening to Jacks apologize.

“Listen,” says Claude. “Stop apologizing. It’s over.”

“I know, but I want --”

“I forgive you if you forgive me for acting like an asshole.” Claude presses his lips together for a moment, then turns as much as he can to look at Jacks. “Ryanne and me both. Forgive us. Let’s all move on.”

“I still miss you,” whispers Jacks, his eyes shut, head tilted back. “I forgive you. I’ll move on. But don’t . . . like . . .” He turns and looks at Claude. “Don’t think this was ever easy for me. I’m sorry I hurt you but don’t think it was easy for me.”

Claude bites back everything he wants to say -- I miss you too; come home with me; can we try again? -- and says, “I know. And I hurt you too, and that wasn’t easy for me either. Ghosting you like that. It fucked me up.”

“So we both fucked it up and now we’re both forgiving each other,” says Jacks tentatively. “I . . .” Claude watches his throat move as he swallows hard. “All right.”

“All right.” Claude wants to reach out and take his hand. Claude wants -- Claude wants so much. “Now I really am going home.”

“If you want to stay, Luc is going to show the rookies how to milk the goats,” Jacks says.

“I definitely want to leave.” Claude tries to say it jokingly but he thinks it comes out too serious because Jacks loses the half-smile that was creeping across his face.

“I’ll see you at practice tomorrow, then.” Jacks gets out of the car before Claude can think of something to say, and swipes his empties from the floor. “Give my love to Ryanne.”

“Jacks --”

“Bye, G.” Jacks slams the door and walks away. Claude doesn’t turn on the car until the sound of Jacks’ feet crunching on the gravel fades.

*

Claude isn’t hung over at practice the next day, but Jacks is. It means something, but Claude isn’t sure what.

***

**Author's Note:**

> Too bad Superstition is not a Yuletide fandom this year, eh? CLAUDE/JACKS IS MY FAVORITE RARE PAIR. (I think technically now there is as many Claude/Jacks fics as there are Jacks/Honore, so it's not a rare pair anymore...? hahaha. NON-CANON RARE PAIR. Whatever.)
> 
> Thanks for all the comments and kudos on the first fic in this series. Knowing that y'all are reading means a lot.


End file.
